I'll be honest, while the facts definitely matter for the individuals in this case, the whole idea that this scenario can happen in the first place is very unsettling to me. Prior to this incident, I had overlooked the degree of control Tesla has over their products and made owning a Tesla one of my medium-term life goals for the environmental benefits.<p>However, upon seeing how they exert the control they have over a vehicle's functions remotely has caused me to rethink whether or not I trust them enough to purchase a product. I can accept unintended bugs, this is a risk I would be willing to take (and hopefully neither me nor my family would suffer terribly for), but for the vehicle itself to have a feature enabled upon sale and then have it disabled after an audit is beyond what I can find acceptable. I understand some fault may rest on the dealer if they misrepresented how they were allowed to sell the car, I'm not talking about "did the customer pay for this feature or not". I'm talking about how such a significant, and expensive, feature of a car can be arbitrarily, and unilaterally, toggled at the whim of the manufacturer.<p>Frankly, I no longer have the confidence that the legal, economic, nor, sadly, the modern moral system of the United States will provide sufficient protection to regular people anymore for these kinds of cases and trends. The encroaching subscription model of commerce is slowly taking ownership away from individuals of the very things they rely on in their daily lives and I don't like it.
The real story is totally missing at this point, so it’s not surprising that the discussion has gone totally off the rails.<p>My understanding is this; <i>any time</i> Tesla buys back or is returned one of its cars, all optional features are cleared off the car.<p>If you sell your used Model S or Model 3 with FSD back to Tesla, one day in the future you may see that VIN for sale on Tesla.com or elsewhere, but the FSD, Acceleration Boost, Homelink, any software upgrades will be cleared off, and available for purchase optionally by the new owner.<p>In a <i>private party</i> sale, the optional features that are currently active on a car will always stay intact. Tesla does not and will not remove a feature from a car unless they have legal possession of the car.<p>The software features on the original sales sticker are irrelevant. The used car dealer bought a car from Tesla <i>without</i> EAP or FSD, and we have no documentation to say otherwise. The feature was disabled while the used car dealer still had the car, before it was sold to the now current owner.<p>When the car was returned under lemon-law back to Tesla, they have every right to reconfigure it however they see fit.<p>If the used car dealer can provide documentation that Tesla sold them EAP or FSD then it’s a different story. That has not happened.
I mean, if you buy a Tesla you know you dont own a car. You are just licensing it. I refuse to support a company that makes me sign a f<i></i>*ing gag order for the privilege of their car. <a href="https://www.slashgear.com/tesla-on-offensive-against-nhtsa-gag-order-allegations-10443577/" rel="nofollow">https://www.slashgear.com/tesla-on-offensive-against-nhtsa-g...</a><p>Screw Tesla and the Authoritarian Technocratic hell they want to enforce on the automotive industry.<p>I cannot fathom how someone can be a tinkerer of things and support a company that continues to barely support things like the magnuson moss warranty act. Companies like Tesla prove we NEED right to repair.<p>I am genuinely curious how the community feels about Tesla's hostility to third party repair and open documentation.
In Europe this would be very straightforward. The car is not "as described" in the sale. Return it to the <i>dealer</i> who has to make it right: add the missing feature, agree a discount, or give a full refund.<p>e.g. <a href="https://www.consumereurope.dk/menu/laws/danish-laws/danish-sale-of-goods-act/" rel="nofollow">https://www.consumereurope.dk/menu/laws/danish-laws/danish-s...</a> § 42 onwards.
Tesla already has a history of retroactively taking stuff from you - especially if it's a salvaged car.<p>Here's what a comment on Tesla Motors Club says you should be prepared to lose on a salvaged car:<p>><i>For anyone purchasing as salvaged Tesla, they should assume Tesla will cut them off from supercharging, software updates, Internet access, and internet use by the media player & navigation system - until Tesla has re-certified the car. Until then preparing for other charging options is prudent.</i><p>At least to me that sounds like a lot of things that they can just take away from your car with a flag.
> <i>The owner in question, who Jalopnik refers to as Alec, purchased the car last December. The dealer bought the car a month earlier from a Tesla auction, with both “Enhanced Autopilot” and “Full Self Driving Mode” features intact</i><p>> TESLA: <i>Tesla has recent identified instances of customers being incorrectly configured for Autopilot versions that they did not pay for. Since, there was an audit done to correct these instances. Your vehicle is one of the vehicles that was incorrectly configured for Autopilot. We looked back at your purchase history and unfortunately Full-Self Driving was not a feature that you had paid for.</i><p>So Buyer 1 bought a vehicle from Tesla that in fact had a feature. Buyer 1 then sold to Buyer 2, advertising this feature. Now Tesla is saying "Full-Self Driving was not a feature that you had paid for". That's incorrect under any interpretation of the events. Tesla could say that it wasn't a feature that Buyer 1 paid for, but Buyer 2 definitely paid for it because it was advertised as having the feature and that would have impacted his willingness to pay for the vehicle.<p>The way Tesla has worded this makes it seem like they would potentially disable features for people who buy Teslas used — regardless of whether the first owner paid for that feature — on the grounds that "X was not a feature that you had paid for".<p>I don't see how the $8,000 (or less, since it's a used vehicle?) that Tesla would get from this would be worth this terrible publicity.
Autopilot must be a really high-margin feature for Tesla. $7k for basically a remotely-managed software license the end-user has no real control over. Once the costs of development, maintenance, and labor are recouped, then each successive AP activation is a big extra margin for Tesla over the normal vehicle price.<p>The entire "Autopilot" feature is technical ability driven by marketing to pump more money out of their car sales. Good business for Tesla, but a shitty thing to do to consumers to treat autopilot as an owner-dependent feature and not as a feature that could be handed off. That's one of the biggest negatives to having cars that can innately phone home to the manufacturer - it gives Tesla the power to giveth and taketh away at their discretion, and leave the car and consumer S.O.L.
I'm surprised that they removed it because it's on the monroney sticker.<p>I bought a BMW that was supposed to get the new/shorter 36 month maintenance included. But the sticker was still referencing the 48 month plan. I didn't even notice.<p>BMW must have ran an audit, and know what they did? They honored the sticker and said something like "Your monro sticker was wrong and said you get 48 months maintenance, so you get 48 months maintenance"<p>I think this just goes back to how they are inexperienced and not a real dealer. I'd expect they'd lose any court battle surrounding it. It's the whole point of the sticker.
> It’s a peculiar situation that raises hard questions<p>I disagree. They sold something, and the resell does not change anything in their side of the calculation. It's not like due to that sale, their backend suddenly has to do more work than if the car had stayed with the original buyer.<p>So the only "argument" tesla can really bring forward why they want this customer to pay for those features a second time is "because we can make them."<p>Not a hard question in my book.
The real kicker is that before Taleb brought it to light, Tesla support was telling people who accidentally purchased the Autopilot feature that "sorry, we can't undo the purchase/the feature is added, and it's permanent".
Here’s the inside scoop - older vehicles used to be much easier to enable autopilot and other paid features, so many places online sold much cheaper upgrades to autopilot and FSD. Tesla has a record of all purchases and the factory state of the vehicle. If the software has been illegally activated they are within their rights to disable the upgrade. This has nothing to do with the license being tied to a person, free supercharging is the only thing tied to a user.<p>Think of it as buying a concert ticket - you get to the venue and they tell you it’s counterfeit. Do you blame the venue or the seller? If they had bought the vehicle from Tesla it would have been a very different story.<p>And for the uninformed folks having a cry about disabled supercharging on salvage titles. Supercharging is automatically disabled on all cars when a serious collision is detected. This is to prevent a rapid and massive o rush of charging current flowing into potentially damaged batteries or HV wiring. Supercharging is a massive amount of energy dumped into the vehicle at once, hundreds times more than a regular home outlet, if something is wrong in the car it could start a fire. The majority of salvage titles have had an airbag deployment and this is one of the triggers for disabling supercharging, salvage title or not. Service will inspect the vehicle and if satisfied of the safety will enable charging again. I think it’s a brilliant feature, and very safely focused.
People keep referring to the Monroney sticker here. It’s irrelevant. Yes, when the car was new, it came with FSD. Then Tesla took it back as a trade, and while it was in their possession, they deleted the features. They are well within their right to do that, since they own the car.<p>There is no Monroney sticker for used car sales, so the one the article shows is a reprint of what the car had when sold new, which is no longer accurate. Just as it would be inaccurate for a gas car if someone had done an engine swap from a V8 to a diesel.<p>The one and only issue is whether Tesla represented that the car came with FSD in the sale at auction to the dealer. If they didn’t, then the dealer doesn’t have a leg to stand on here, unfortunately.<p>Another analogy - I might buy a car at auction where the Sirius radio works, because the old owner forgot to disable it. If they disable it later, then I would only have a claim if the seller claimed that the car came with lifetime free Sirius. Just because it worked when I bought it, doesn’t mean it will keep working, if it wasn’t intended to be included with the car.<p>As others have noted, Tesla does not remove features except when they are the owner of the car. The only exception being, “lifetime free supercharging” does not transfer with change of ownership, except on the oldest Model S cars out there.
Looking at it from the original buyers perspective,
When they sold/traded in their used Model S to Tesla did the price they get take into account the self drive feature, or do Tesla pay the same trade in regardless of software features?
If Tesla aren't buying back the feature then it makes it even less enticing to buy it on a new car as it has 100% depreciation!
If they're paying for it at trade in then removing it before they sell it on then thats kinda fair enough its a bit like a dealer taking in a car with fancy wheels and putting stock ones on before they sell it on, sucks for the used buyer if they then have to pay full new price to add that feature later but...
Although in this case it seems the issue is that Tesla sold a used car with a feature and then decided to take that feature back, which is theft in my book pure and simple.
Tesla is kind of hostile to second hand market. No spare parts , no service history info, unauthorized repair disables charging etc.. Basically Apple mentality.<p>Car with a good maintenance should last 20 years. Not like a phone that gets thrown away every 5 years.
Doesn’t Tesla understand that this behavior diminishes the value of their current customers’ cars. If I currently own a Tesla and want to sell it, who would want to buy it knowing that Tesla could remove features anytime. They have just decimated the value of their cars. The market will correct their behavior.
This is absurd. It’s theft, plain and simple. Tesla wants to habe each owner of the car pay the $7,000 software update option, yet when someone pays for it, they refuse to transfer the license to the buyer’s next car.
Even since they made autopilot standard, I still find this whole payment structure hard to swallow. I would understand the idea of end of life support or even a monthly subscription because I wholly embrace the idea of more maintainable code and features in cars. It’s not realistic to expect all of that for free in an as of yet imperfect technology. At a bare minimum, the infrastructure needs to be managed and maintained. This is a bit idealistic, but it may hopefully even lead to better industry standardization in the future.<p>With that in mind, the whole lump-sum pay structure just feels grubby. What if I buy the car, pay for the features, decide I don’t like it and sell it in a short period of time? Granted, it’s likely a poor financial decision on my part, but I’m left with no way to recoup that part of my investment. Rather than being a depreciating asset, it’s not an asset at all. Worse still, tweaks to refund policies are likely to be unsatisfactory. I already said I’m willing to pay something, but the choices I’m provided are to either demand an refund, the process of which feels like wasting everyone’s time involved, or make an arbitrary donation of capital to Tesla, Inc. Meanwhile, the terms continue to change for new buyers and aren’t evenly applied to old or used buyers. Just do the math for me, let me sign up and be done with it. Software is soft, water is wet, etc. If they don’t get this in check, the old guard could eat their lunch like people keep predicting.
I think it's just a matter of time until Tesla moves to a subscription model. The current model of selling FSD as an early adopter package relies a lot on the promise it will be there soon and the expectation that the value (and price) will go up. If Tesla doesn't deliver on their FSD promises before current owners start looking for their next car, there's a huge risk of disappointment. These will be customers who paid thousands of dollars for FSD functionality that they never got.<p>Turning FSD into a subscription solves this: allowing customers to take the functionality to their next car keeps the current customer base happy and avoids messing up resale value if Tesla does not manage to deliver FSD on current hardware. It also creates a huge incentive for current owners to make their next car also a Tesla.<p>Tesla is already starting to offer premium functionality such as entertainment on a subscription model. As soon as FSD is good enough that people actually want to pay monthly for it (and not just the promise of it), I expect Tesla will do the same for FSD (and maybe even for other things like performance upgrades).
This reminds me of Sony removing OtherOS from the Playstation 3. Users had to choose between updating their software and losing the ability to run Linux, or never being able to play online or buy a new game. It is outrageous for company to remove advertised features after the fact, and I haven't bought a Sony device since.
This is one of the main reasons I won't buy a Tesla. They can just turn off things you paid for at will.<p>The other is they won't open up their parts for people to work on their own cars. That's one of the main reasons used Teslas are so expensive. I mean even salvaged Teslas are really expensive.
>Tesla has recent identified instances of customers being incorrectly configured for Autopilot versions that they did not pay for<p>Can you "pirate" Autopilot? Like enable it on cars which didn't come with it, where the buyer originally didn't pay?
> <i>Oh hey, we realized our internal inventory system had this car with 16" wheels but it actually has 18".</i><p>> <i>We're taking the 18s back. Here are some 16" steelies</i><p>Pretty sure you'd get shot in some parts of the world for trying that.
So they basically "accidentally" sold more then they wanted to and then went after the customer (which by now happened to have changed) and <i>forcefully</i> toke it away.<p>(And yes this can only be described as forcefully taking away something because they never did something like informing the customer that an accident happened and cooperating with that person to resolve it. Normally it would be common for a company which did such a mistake to
either just "eat the loss" or sell the remaining part under a 50% and upward discount or so.)
Is the software upgrade tied to the car, or the individual? I think something like this will require legislation.
If I buy a car with a feature, and I am paying extra for that feature, then I expect it to still be part of the car when I sell it, since that was part of the value to begin with.<p>If Tesla wants to argue otherwise, that the software is tied to the individual, then I should be able to either:<p>1) Sell the software itself to whoever<p>2) Transfer the software to my next car<p>Both of these should be options, since in the case of #2, the next car may not have the same upgrade.
It makes me question the methodology Tesla uses for refurbishing and reselling a lemon.<p>It would’ve been pretty easy to restore non autopilot software (as this event shows) before they sold it.<p>After seeing the way this is handled, I for sure wouldn’t be willing to spend $8K on a feature that can be removed so easily if I was configuring a new Tesla - regardless of whether or not private party sales have different policies.<p>The SAAS model is less appealing when it comes to durable goods.<p>Indeed, maybe we shouldn’t allow software features to be rolled back after the car is delivered.<p>I decided against Tesla in 2017 when I bought my first EV. I wasn’t into the complete lack of control in ownership - no ability to order parts or do my own repairs, vendor lock in for onboard DC fast charging equipment, cars made on “beta test” like production lines in tented parking lots, the chance of nefarious software updates from Tesla (or others) bricking functionality the car; or causing security issues.<p>Maybe the buyer should’ve done more homework, call Tesla before purchase and verify features?<p>It’s a bad situation for the buyer; and another reason I have added to the growing list of reasons not to buy a Tesla.
So what it sounds like happened here is:<p>Tesla sells vehicle, original owner doesn't buy FSD. Sells vehicle back to Tesla.<p>Telsa turns FSD on, maybe as part of the recertification process, and forgets to turn it off.<p>Telsa resells vehicle to dealer, listed with FSD. Dealer resells to current owner, with FSD.<p>Systems audit at Tesla reconciles the sales data with the car features data, and rather than just eating their mistake, they turn off FSD.
This reminds me of Samsung disabling the Galaxy phone SPO2 oxygen sensor in Samsung Health but only for Canada. To me selling a phone with a certain hardware feature then disabling months or years later without notice is fraud. My dad used it frequently since he has COPD and is on supplemental oxygen (yes I know it's not a medical device but it's a ballpark).
Bottom line: The car dealership and / or new owner have a case here.<p>Since Tesla itself sold a car that had autopilot features, it is expected that those features would remain. The dealer bought the car and the fact that it had autopilot features (auto park I suppose?) when the dealer bought it, they were able to test the car and use the feature to assess and market the car's abilities.<p>Basically it was what it was at the time of the (original) sale. If Tesla wants to be more careful about this in the future that's OK, but they need to remove those features before any party is accepting it in a sale.<p>I think the owner needs to send a lawsuit to Tesla that offers court, settlement of $8000 or the features to be turned back on - and that's being nice - since at this point the owner has probably gone through the wringer of social media nightmare scenarios at this point.
I, like everyone else here, was initially outraged that this could happen and I immediately thought "Oh Tesla, what have you done to your public perception". This is just not what people are expecting and this scenario works against Tesla being embraced by the "every man".<p>However, I did have another thought that I have not seen talked about - does the person that originally bought the car still have autopilot? In other words, if they buy a <i>new</i> Tesla, does it automatically come with autopilot? Is the purchase of autopilot linked to the <i>person</i> and not the <i>car</i>?<p>Though I still don't like that, I could be at least be persuaded to accept that paradigm.
What if the “license” to use FSDM belongs to the user and not the car?
What if the original owner comes back and claims that he bought the license and he should be allowed to use it in his new car rather than go with the old car? Is that an unfair demand.<p>That is how it works for my Tesla. I bought one of the original 10000 or so Tesla and they came with unlimited supercharging. Tesla told me that I will have unlimited supercharging even if I get a new Tesla which I think is a better solution than it going away when I sell the old car.
In my view, if the buyer and seller were acting in good faith and if the vehicle was equipped and sold with optional features included, activated or installed, as a result of an error claimed by the manufacturer, the optional features are deemed included in the purchase price at the point of sale.<p>The bad faith in this case points to the manufacturer for attempting to reclaim ownership and control of something it unwittingly transferred and sold to the buyer.
Here’s the inside scoop - older vehicles used to be much easier to enable autopilot and other paid features, so many places online sold much cheaper upgrades to autopilot and FSD. Tesla has a record of all purchases and the factory state of the vehicle. If the software has been illegally activated they are within their rights to disable the upgrade.<p>Think of it as buying a concert ticket - you get to the venue and they tell you it’s counterfeit. Do you blame the venue or the seller? If they had bought the vehicle from Tesla it would have been a very different story.<p>And for the uninformed folks having a cry about disabled supercharging on salvage titles. Supercharging is automatically disabled on all cars when a serious collision is detected. This is to prevent a rapid and massive o rush of charging current flowing into potentially damaged batteries or HV wiring. Supercharging is a massive amount of energy dumped into the vehicle at once, hundreds times more than a regular home outlet, if something is wrong in the car it could start a fire. The majority of salvage titles have had an airbag deployment and this is one of the triggers for disabling supercharging, salvage title or not. Service will inspect the vehicle and if satisfied of the safety will enable charging again. I think it’s a brilliant feature, and very safely focused.
Seems to me that it depends on if you buy the software for your account or for your car. Both are valid buissness models as far as I am concerned. If you buy it for your account you should only have to pay it once and then migrate it from car to car. If you buy it for the car it should be bound to the car.
So it is a real question. How can they get away with it? I genuinely love Tesla as a piece of technology and I think they brought ridiculous amount of progress to otherwise stagnant market.<p>That said, how is that legal? To me it is as bad as disabling brakes or changing the way battery behaves.<p>News like that make me hate the future.
I guess the real question is, is autopilot a <i>service</i> (i.e. requiring realtime use of remote infrastructure) or is it a <i>feature</i> that functions independently? In the second example, Tesla would be just arbitraging legal curiosities surrounding EULAs, which is kind of shitty.
Yep Tesla is committing an unforced error. Yanking shit from a purchased car is uncool. Since somebody payed for that feature, it has value. Tesla should have cut a check to the present owner for the value of the feature that was being removed. Bad move Tesla.
This sort of thing is one of the reasons why I avoid hardware or software that phones home and/or engages in automatic updates. I can't imagine a circumstance where I'd buy a Tesla or any other vehicles that are controlled by the manufacturer.
That's beyond fucked up. This essentially guarantees no market for second hand Teslas in the future. It was already questionable with the battery situation whether these cars would sell on the used market after say $100k miles or whatever the initial battery is limited to before it dies and requires an expensive replacement. But now it's clear. I certainly won't be buying this garbage. This is not revolutionary. With no resale market, I doubt they are even more environmentally friendly than ICE cars which can and are resold and won't need expensive battery replacements. This is devolution not evolution. So much for Musk's genius. He seems more like the typical silicon valley billionaire asshole that he truly is every day.
Wow. My takeaway: Buy direct from Tesla, or risk having a sub-optimal ride.<p>Seems a bit evil to me. I can't imagine another car manufacturer penalizing you for buying from somewhere else.
This makes me wonder if someone could jailbreak these cars and offer the features for free. Seems like for $7000 for a feature there must be huge incentive to do so.
Wasn’t there an article recently about someone ordering this feature accidentally, and Tesla saying it was non-refundable? Talk about having your cake and eating it.
Tesla might be "the F-35 of personal autos", but it kind of makes sense for have the AI part of a product be SaaS. The company invested a ton in R&D, and it's also liable for the damages (including deaths!) that the feature might produce if it malfunctions (hence they'd want it disabled after N years period where supporting it is no longer cost effective - even the fact that a city's roads configuration drastically changes 10 years in the future independent of the car could make the self-driving system unsafe, it's a systems issue here, no longer and "isolated product"!).<p>We're probably going to start seeing this more and more with "truly smart" devices... Though we do need ways to re-sell software licenses for firmware and stuff while they are still supported, even if separately from the actual hardware.
I love the way everyone takes this at face value and it's just true now.<p>I guess it's why we have fake news, just say it once.<p>It's clearly a mix-up they will fix.<p>It's probably when software updates happen it checks to see what to update on the account and deletes everything else.<p>But lets not think to hard. Not like anyone here has made a mistake coding or had to deal with middle managers.<p>And there are clearly issues with the ability to remote delete, Kindles had their OMG Amazon is deleting books period, and it sorted itself out.<p>It also allows you to get updates, that's pretty OMG too quite frankly.